GQ and Canongate celebrate the True Adventures of Stanley Booth

"They chose
to do this free concert and paid this tremendous price," a visibly
shaken Stanley Booth announced on stage last night, discussing the
disastrous 1969 Altamont concert by the Rolling Stones. To mark the republishing of
his definitive account of the tour by Canongate,
Booth together with Geoff Dyer and Mick Brown, watched and
discussed Gimme Shelter, the notorious documentary
that shows the band playing on a stage the size of a billiard table
to a crowd of 300,000 as chaos erupted around them. As well as
revealing his literary influences (Hemingway, Chandler, Nabokov,
Kerouac) and how he got such incredible access ("The Stones ignored
me which was the best thing they could have done for my purposes"),
Booth discussed the violence of the Hell's Angels, recording at
Muscle Shoals and how close they came to Charles Manson...

Stanley Booth on...

Watching the film
"I was traumatized all over again…. that was terrifying. It
brought back just how frightening the experience was. I was, as I'm
sure we all were, afraid for my life. The last thing you see [on
screen] getting on the helicopter was the seat of my Levi's. The
helicopter was terribly overloaded. Gram Parsons was there.
Michelle Phillips from the Mamas and the Papas got in the
helicopter and we were off. We nearly crashed while landing a short
distance away, and then we got on a real plane back to San
Francisco."

The role of the Hell's Angels
"The Stones didn't hire the Angels - the Hell's
Angels just came and acted like Hells Angels. We saw a lot of
people pole-axed by pool cues with lead weights in them. The Stones had no idea - they had hired the
London Hells Angels before [in July] who were a bit like the
American boy scouts."

What the Gimme Shelter cameras didn't catch
"The Stones played for an hour and a half. Wonderful music. The
film gives the impression they left the stage after [audience
member] Meredith Hunter was killed… but we didn't know he had been
killed. We just knew many violent occurrences have taken
place."

Charting the tour's decline
"We started in Colorado in November and by December we had created
Vietnam in California."

The effect Altamont had on the Stones
"It changed them profoundly - Mick has always disputed that idea but
it's true….next time they toured America Mick was head to toe in pink, the stage
was much higher and there was adequate security."

The highlight of his time on tour
"Muscle Shoals was a wonderful four days. In that time they cut
"Brown Sugar," "Wild Horses," and "You Gotta Move". They were
sincere blues fans. When they sang "You may be high / You may be
low / You may be rich, child / You may be poor / But when the Lord
gets ready / You gotta move" they believed that."

The band's work ethic
"They always began the session by sounding incompetent. They kept
plugging away at a song until it coalesced into a harmonious and
effective work of art."

How bad it really got at Altamont
"If Jesus had been there he would have been crucifixed… a horrific
experience. The Stones had the best of intentions but they
opened a door and had to go through it. We all had to go through
it."

Hearing about "The Family"
"We never locked the doors. Manson and the family could have come
and killed us all. We were at Muscle Shoals when he was arrested.
Our first reaction was: "He's just some poor hippy being
victimised." We were wrong about that."

Why it took him until 1984 to finish the
book
"I had to become someone else in order to tell the story. I
persisted and thank God I did. As Keith says: "I'm happy to be here - I'm
happy to be anywhere." It's a long and complicated book with many
characters and many incidents and I'm a slow writer at best. I
wanted to write a book that someone could pick up 100 years later
and be moved, involved and engaged by…even if they had no idea who
the Rolling Stones were. Mark Twain said that "If a book is
really good it will last forever… and by forever I mean 30 years."
It's done that."

Why Altamont will always be with him
"We never got over it. I don't expect to get over it. I don't want
to get over it."

The True Adventures Of The Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth
(Canongate) is out now. Click here for more information: canongate.tv

Andy Morris

Andy Morris is the former editor of GQ.co.uk and a ten year veteran of GQ. Follow him on Twitter @iamandymorris.